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GLEN HOBBIE After he pitched a game for the Cubs, Glen Hobbie would take a shower and go home. No ice packs, no rubdowns, no special treatment. “The only guy I know who used ice at that time was Sandy Koufax,” said Hobbie, who pitched for the Cubs from 1957 to 1964. The big right-hander shut out Cincinnati in his first major league start May 6, 1958, and he won 16 games in back-to-back seasons in 1959 and 1960. But Hobbie also lost 20 games in 1960. He held St. Louis to one hit on April 21, 1959, retiring the first 20 batters he faced. The Cardinals’ Stan Musial got the only hit, but Hobbie got revenge later in the game and, more important, the win.
I have one flashback to that game, the one-hitter. Sammy Taylor called for a fastball to Musial, and I shook him off and threw a curve, and Musial got a hit. But you know Musial getting that one hit didn’t affect my life. I can remember exactly where the pitch was. It was higher than I wanted. I wanted it down below the knees and I got it waist high. It barely cleared the left field chalk line about three inches. What no one remembers is in that same game in the ninth inning with two outs, I walked somebody, the score was still 1–0. Somehow, the runner ended up on second base and Musial came up again. He’s at the plate again and he hits a ground ball back to me, and I throw him out, so I got him out when I had to.
Look at the complete games I had in 1960. How many times do you do that? Sixteen games. Usually you don’t have that many for a whole team. I pitched an awful lot. I had guys on other ballclubs say, “Hobbie, they’re going to ruin you.” I don’t think that was it. I just burned out at the end of the year. I lost 20 because I was in the game long enough to get a decision.
There was a Friday when I pitched eight innings against St. Louis and got beat, and came back to the ballpark Sunday morning and they said, “You’re pitching on one day’s rest,” and won 1–0. You did a lot of pitching back then. You did what you were told to do.
We weren’t worth three, four, five million dollars like they are today. I’m not sorry. We made decent money back then. We didn’t make an overabundance of money. That game I pitched against St. Louis when Musial got the one hit, I don’t think there were 1,000 people in the stands. Baseball was just growing at that time. The only time you really had super crowds was when you played St. Louis in a weekend series or Milwaukee in a weekend series, and that time you’d have 30,000, 34,000. We had some great ballplayers, too. One year we had five guys who hit 20 or more home runs and Banks hit 44. We had exciting players to watch.
I watched Ernie and wondered how he could do it because he did it so easy. He did it so effortlessly. It seemed like it was no effort at all. When he hit a home run, it was just like he got a base hit. He was super to watch.
Musial gave me trouble. I didn’t have a whole lot of trouble against Hank Aaron. The guys I had trouble with were usually the contact hitters. The free swingers, I got out, the home run hitters. Probably the toughest guy I ever had to face was Frank Robinson. He stood right on the plate. You couldn’t get him out inside or get him out outside. When I got him out, he nearly killed an infielder. |
